Hateful describes something made of hate, or something that deserves it. Hateful messages under a video; a hateful thing to say to a child.
The first sense dominates now: hateful language, hateful comments, a hateful campaign, sitting in the news beside hate speech and hate crime. The older sense means detestable, and it survives in fiction — a hateful little man, that hateful house at the end of the lane. Keep it apart from hated: a hated man is one that people hate, while a hateful man is full of hate, or worth hating, and only the sentence around it tells you which. The adverb is hatefully, and hatefulness is the noun, though both are rare next to the adjective.
1adjectivespitefulFull of hate, or expressing hate.
“The comments under the post were openly hateful.”
2adjectivehatefulDeserving hate; horrible.
“It was a hateful thing to do to an old man.”
synonyms: detestable, loathsome
Hateful is a Middle English word, built the plain way: hate plus the ending -ful, meaning full of hate. The -ful does the same job it does in careful and painful. The hate half of it goes back much further, to a Proto-Indo-European root written kad-.
Proto-Indo-European
*keh₂d-
Middle English
hateful
English, today
hateful
From Middle English hateful. by surface analysis, en + hate + ful.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Word Building
First appears in chapter 5 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word